Poor Laura Fernee revealed a painful truth on national daytime television yesterday: she is just too beautiful to work. The thirty-three year old scientist says that her slim figure and pretty face have made the world of employment intolerable. Men cannot treat her as anything other than an object of desire and female colleagues hate her because they are jealous. ‘There is nothing I could do to stop it,” she lamented.
In Saudi Arabia earlier this year, authorities removed three men from the Jenadrivah Heritage and Culture Festival in Riyadh because they were ‘too handsome’ and likely to provoke lustful thoughts among the women who caught sight of them. The men were deported, thus saving the authorities from having to deal with amorous glances distracting the female population from the spirit of the festival.
Far be it for me to understand the suffering endured by the exceptionally attractive, but I do see that it is important for everyone to understand their individual weaknesses. My personal favourite is a young girl I knew in London who was asked at a job interview what her greatest failing was and, instead of rolling out the usual spin about being far too conscientious or hard-working, she replied that her problem was that she was ‘really really lazy.’ Not surprisingly, her response was not met with enthusiasm.
In some circumstances our weaknesses are less immediately obvious or detrimental, but nonetheless worth confronting. For example, if a company is aware that social media is a useful way to communicate with customers but does not know how to set about engaging, metaphorically dipping a toe in the water is a good start, but, without data analysis and a well-considered strategy, it is more likely their efforts will make them blend into the crowd like the thousands of men at the Saudi festival who were deemed unattractive enough not to distract the female sex.
To stand out from the crowd, research and expertise are required. There are a number of analytic tools available which can identify the demographic of the people visiting a website, what the optimum time is for them to visit and what type of posts elicit the greatest number of responses or which key words attract the greatest number of searches. All this is valuable data but it is specific to one business. What many companies want to know is what other companies are doing and how far they have gone to embrace the new technology. After all, Laura Fernee only thinks she is too beautiful because she is able to compare herself with other women.
To meet this demand, Admiral has produced its own analytic tool, SociaLIGHT, which identifies the strengths and weaknesses of companies in a way that they can easily compare their social media success with others in their sector and region. Similarly, having insight into where and how a good social media strategy is effective for someone else, provides important information upon which to base future plans.
Click on the link to get your company’s SociaLIGHT score.
